Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy, 2015
Toward a Global Measure "Modern India," apart from naming a time and place, has come to stand in ... more Toward a Global Measure "Modern India," apart from naming a time and place, has come to stand in for an interminable struggle with history-the struggle to formulate, despite the violence of its antiquity, an ethics of justice for the present; the struggle to affirm, in spite of the exclusions of its modernity, a belief in democracy that is still to come. This book examines the intellectual and political history of the encounter between Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), two of the most formidable non-Western thinkers of the twentieth century, whose visions of moral and political life have left the deepest imprints on that struggle and the paradox that sustains it. One was a prodigious "untouchable" who, lifting himself against the exclusion and violence that surrounded him, became a revolutionary constitutionalist, a thinker whose laborious draftsmanship and exegetical rigor produced a new constitution for the free republic in 1950. The other, born in a community of Hindu Vaishnava merchants, was an inept lawyer who galvanized through the sheer force of his convictions and prose-and often through his commitment to the virtues of such quotidian and solitary practices as spinning and weaving-an as-yet-unformed people against the most powerful empire of his time. Never had the colonial world's right to justice been formulated in such proximity by two thinkers who had other wise struggled so ceaselessly, with such scruple and hostility, against each other. But perhaps more crucially, never had this right to justice been sought in the shadows of a religion known to be so persistently oppressive and violent toward those it claimed as its very own. Ambedkar's and Gandhi's struggle was waged as much over the modern and secularist "faith in equality" as it was around the place and boundaries of faith in secularist notions of equality itself. 1 Radical Equality reconstructs the morals and methods of that formidable
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After all, few others have the courage to see that which what the architect must face in advance, even before he draws his first line: the democratic will to ruin, a people pulled into the moral abyss of violence by that line of resentful, seething force along which human compulsions meet the gravity of laws. Can law alone ever hold the line when it meets the full force of a people's tyranny (and their ordinary vices)? The architect, as Judith Shklar might put it, is not simply a draftsman of this line; he is the sovereign witness of its disappearance. From this act of being a witness emerges a very difficult freedom. But it might be, as Ambedkar foretells, the only freedom worthy of our time.